It is fitting that novels Jose Saramago they get an electronic edition, a virtual presence, because Saramago was the first to talk about virtual literature, which "seems to have separated itself from reality in order to better reveal its hidden secrets" (Notebooks; quotes are taken from the translation by Jasmine Nešković and Jovan Tatić, Laguna, 2021; Prim. prev.). He gives credit Jorge Luis Borges as the inventor of that kind of literature, but I brought into it one quality of greatness that Borges's fiction lacks: a passionate and sympathetic interest in ordinary people and everyday human life.
We probably don't need new categories, but virtual literature could be useful: it differs from science fiction and speculative fiction, which are characterized by a penchant for extrapolation and entirely fictional realities; from satire and its ameliorative anger; from magical realism, which is native to South America, as well as from modernist realism and its focus on the banal. I would say that virtual literature has something in common with all those types (they really overlap) but it differs from them insofar as its goal, as Saramago said, is to reveal a secret.
In his books, it is a discovery of the most mundane and unpretentious kind - there are no great epiphanies, only light gathers and slowly arrives, as in the hours before dawn. The revealed secret is daylight, a clear vision of the world, a mystery that happens literally every day.
Saramago died in the summer of 2010. He was 87 years old. He wrote his first great novel when he was over 60, and his last - FABRIC - he finished shortly before his death.
I must continue to speak of him in the present tense, he lives so vividly in his books, those works of the "senior citizen," which is our condescending euphemism for the dreaded word "old man." His extraordinary talent for invention and narrative, his radical intelligence, insight, wit, prudence and kindness will be immediately noticed by those who respect these qualities in an artist, but age gives his art a unique strength. He has something new to say to each of us, even to old readers who are tired of the young or rejuvenated who tell us what we all told when we were young. Saramago left behind decades of shortness of breath. He grew up. As much as it may seem like heresy to the followers of the cult of youth, he is more than he was in his youth: more of a man, a personality, an artist. He went further and learned more. He is the only novelist of my generation who tells me something I didn't know or, more precisely, that I didn't know: the only one I'm still learning from. He had the time and courage to acquire that refined kind of understanding that we mistakenly call wisdom. Namely, wisdom is most often called easy comfort. Saramago is certainly no comforter. Although he does not parrot the advice of despair, he does not have much faith in hope, that sweet-talking trickster.
Radical means "from the roots", and Saramago was a deeply rooted man. When he received the Nobel Prize in the royal castle, he spoke passionately and simply about his ancestors from the Alentejo plains, peasants, very poor people who were a permanent, dear presence and moral role model for him. He was a radical conservative in the true sense of the word, and it has nothing to do with the reactionary croaking of the neoconservatives, which he despised. An atheist and a socialist, he advocated not just beliefs or opinions but rational convictions, built on a clear ethical foundation that could almost be reduced to a single sentence, but a sentence with very complex political, social and spiritual implications: it is bad to hurt people who are weaker than you. (...)
Saramago's words are famous: "God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence" (Notebooks). He is not often so dramatically epigrammatic. I would describe his usual attitude towards God as curiosity, disbelief, humor and patience - which couldn't be further from the banter of professional atheists. And yet he is an atheist, anti-clerical, distrustful of religion; the powerful from that domain, of course, hate him, which he reciprocates with all his heart. In enchanting Notebooks (blogs from 2008 and 2009) criticizes the mufti of Saudi Arabia, who legalized the marriage of ten-year-old girls and thereby legalized pedophilia, and the Pope of Rome, who is so unwilling to condemn pedophilia among his priests - and this is about the powerful hurting the helpless. Saramago's atheism is combined with his feminism, a fierce anger at the mistreatment, underpayment and undervaluing of women, the way every society abuses power over them. And all this is combined with his socialism. Saramago is on the side of the poor and oppressed.
There is no sentimentality with him. With his understanding of people, he brings us something very rare: disappointment in which there is room for love and admiration, a tendency to lucid forgiveness. He doesn't expect too much from us. Perhaps he is closer in spirit and humor to our first great novelist Cervantes than anyone else. When the dream of reason and hope for justice are constantly met with disappointment, cynicism is an easy way out; but the stubborn peasant Saramago will not use it.
Of course, he was not a peasant. He rose from the poverty of his ancestors, first by working as a car mechanic, then to build himself into an educated, cultured intellectual and man of the pen, publisher and journalist. He had lived in the city for years and loved Lisbon; he dealt with the topics of urban/industrial life as an insider. However, in his novels he often observes city life from a place outside the city, from a place where people earn a living with their hands. It does not offer an idyllic return to pastoral life, but a realistic sense of place and the way ordinary people originally relate to what remains of our shared world.
The most visible radical thing in his novels is punctuation. Readers can be put off by his use of commas instead of full stops and his refusal to divide the text into paragraphs, so that the page looks like a scary typeface, and in the dialogue it is often not immediately clear who is speaking. It is a radical regression, a return to medieval manuscripts in which there are no spaces between words. I do not know his reasons for these idiosyncrasies. I've learned to accept them, but I still don't like them; his use of what teachers call "too many commas" (using commas instead of other punctuation marks) or "run-on sentences" makes me read too fast, out of breath, and then lose sentence form and normal conversational rhythm (speech-pause) .
If we accept this peculiarity, in the hands of great translators his prose is clear, convincing, lively, strong, perfectly aligned with the narrative. He doesn't mince words. He is a great storyteller. (Try reading it out loud.) And the stories he tells us are unlike any other.
Here are a few brief observations about them, reflections on my process of learning how to read Saramago, a process that is certainly not over.
His first published novel Raised from the ground not yet available in English. I assume that it is about peasants from Alentejo. Saramago says that it is the book "in which my method of narration in the novel was born", and that is why I am dying to see it.
Roman Seven Suns and seven Moons, published in Portugal in 1982, quickly gained recognition in Europe. An unusual, enchanting, fun, mischievous historical fantasy, full of unexpected and unpredictable elements such as Domenico Scarlatti, the Inquisition, the Witch and the Airplane. It seems to me that this book is a pleasant warm-up for his larger novels, but it earned him the reputation of a great writer and many still consider it one of his best works.
I had the most difficulties with The year Rikard Reiš died. This is where Saramago is closest to Borges's intellectual style. And maybe it is his most Portuguese novel. That book requires the reader, if not knowledge, about some topics (the poet Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese literary culture, Lisbon), at least the fascination with masks, doubles, false identities, which Saramago had, and which I am completely deprived of. For the reader who shares this fascination with him, this novel (as well as the later Double man) is a real treasure.
In his autobiography for the Nobel Prize, he simply says about the next book: "When the Portuguese state censorship forbade The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991) is in the running for the European Literary Prize on the pretext that the book is offensive to Catholics, I have moved our residence to the Canary Island of Lanzarote.” Most of those who left their homeland in protest against tyrannical bigotry are shouting, pointing fingers, waving their fists. Saramago only "moved his residence". I admit that the subject of this book is not the most interesting to me either, but it is a subtle, gentle and very disturbing work, a remarkable addition to the long list of novels about Jesus (which begins, as the title suggests, with the Gospels themselves).
Stone raft is a wonderful novel, which had the very rare fortune of being made into a wonderful movie in Spain. The European mainland is splitting along the Pyrenees and the Iberian Peninsula is slowly moving towards the Canary Islands and beyond, towards America... Saramago brilliantly uses this situation to mock the impatient and impotent pomposity of the authorities and the media in the face of events beyond the reach of the bureaucracy and political advisers and to explore the reactions of unknown citizens , so-called "ordinary people" to a mysterious event. It is one of his most entertaining books, in which we also find Saramago's first significant dog. I tend to rate his novels with a dog as better than those without a dog. I do not know why; perhaps it has something to do with his refusal to see man as a key figure in the order of things. Sometimes it seems that the more people fixate on humanity, the less humane they are.
Then follows - he is now in his seventies and finishes a novel every year or every other year - The story of the siege of Lisbon. When I read that novel for the first time, I liked it, but I had the impression that I was stupid and ignorant because it was, one might say, the founding event of Portuguese history, and I know nothing about Portuguese history. I read too carelessly to realize that my ignorance doesn't change anything. On re-reading, I saw that everything I needed to know was in the novel itself: the "real" history of what happened in the twelfth century, during the Christian siege of the Moors in Lisbon, and the "virtual" history, which intertwines with the real thanks to to change a single word, a typographical error that a corrector in the twentieth century deliberately introduced into the new Story of the Siege of Lisbon. The hero of that history (and love story) is precisely the concealer, which in itself was enough to win me over.
Immediately after that mild and meditative story came Blindness (Portuguese title is Essay on blindness), which brought its author the Nobel Prize. Neither before nor after Blinded I have not read a novel that is so profoundly terrifying.
It was the first Saramago novel I tried to read - my poet friend Naomi Replanski she said i had to read it. I tried and failed. The punctuation annoyed me and the story horrified me.
In order to agree to read about terrible cruelty, I have to trust the author. I have to trust him unconditionally, as we do To Levi. There are too many writers who use violence and cruelty to sell their books, to create "tension" in readers who think only "action" is interesting, or to appease their own demons by throwing them at others. I don't read such books. I will only let the writer torture me if I accept his reasons for doing so. I had to find out Saramago's reasons, so I got all his books that were available in English translation at the time and read them. Too fast, too careless, as I said, but I was ignorant - I was learning how to read Saramago. To read Saramago actually means to be educated, to learn anew how to see the world, to learn a new kind of understanding... as happens when meeting all great novelists, from Cervantes through Jane Austen, from Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Garcia Marquez...
Having learned that I can absolutely trust the author, I returned to read Blindness. For me, it is an almost unbearably moving novel and the truest parable about the twentieth century. (I didn't see the movie based on it; I didn't trust those who made it.) Blindness has completely changed my idea of what literature, in this terrible time of paralysis in the midst of crisis, can be and do.
Soon after Blinded she came The story of an unknown island, a magical and witty allegory, and right after it All names, perhaps his most Kafkaesque novel, is a satire of monstrous bureaucracy. But the comparison of Saramaga s Kafka is stepping on slippery ground; I can't imagine that Saramago would write Transformation, just as I can't imagine Kafka writing a romance novel. Novel All names, with its Registry leading backwards, into pitch darkness, with its protagonist Mr. José tirelessly searching for the person behind one of the countless names in the Registry documents, may not be exactly a love story, but it is a love story.
Later on Travels through Portugal, a detailed travel guide to his native country that is not included in this anthology, Saramago wrote a novel Cave, which I have to say I liked the most out of all of them because I like the people in it a lot. Saramago will tell us what that book is about - although while he was writing these words from Notebook he didn't have that novel in mind, but the world as he saw it in 2009.
Every day, some animal and plant species, some language, some craft disappear. The rich are getting richer day by day, and the poor are getting poorer... Ignorance is spreading at an alarming rate. We have a huge problem with the distribution of wealth. Resource exploitation has reached diabolical proportions. Multinational companies rule the world. I don't know if the shadows or the images are obscuring the reality. We can talk about it until doomsday, but there is no doubt that we have lost the ability to critically analyze what is happening in the world. That is why it seems as if we are imprisoned in Plato's cave. We neglected the duty to think, to act. We have turned into some kind of inert beings deprived of the ability to complain, riot and revolt, qualities that have graced us for many years. We are coming to the end of a civilization, and I don't like the one that is coming. In my opinion, neoliberalism is just a new totalitarianism disguised as democracy, of which it has preserved only the facade. The shopping center is a symbol of that new world. But there is another small world that is disappearing, the world of manufacture and craftsmanship...
It's the backbone Caves, an extraordinarily rich book, which very skilfully uses science fiction extrapolation to build a refined and complex philosophical meditation and which is, at the same time and above all, a powerful novel of character. I can't help but mention that one of the characters in that novel is a dog.
In 2004, he arrived Double man, which fell rather hard for me, but I haven't read it again yet, so my judgment on it would be worthless now. After that he came A record of discernment, which takes over the situation and some characters from Blinded, but he uses them in a completely different way (no one could accuse Saramago of constantly writing one and the same, or even similar, book). It's a killer political satire, very dark - paradoxically, its ending and implications are darker than Blinded.
By then, the author was already deep into the eighties; it is not unusual that he decided to write a book about death and a novel was born Death and its vagaries. The starting point is irresistible. One Death (because Death is not just one, but many persons, and each of them is responsible for one area - after all, bureaucracy is everywhere) gets tired of her job, and decides to take a vacation. That's Saramago's big theme: a humble official who decides to do something just a little different, just once... That's why no one dies in the area for which Death is responsible. The problems that arise as a result are described with very strong humor. Death himself is an interesting person, but it seems to me that the book is breathed into life halfway through (if I may say so) by the appearance of a cellist and a dog.
In the year I am writing this, 2010, shortly after Saramago's death, an English translation of the novel was published An Elephant's Journey. If it were his last book, no writer would have had a more perfect last word - but it is not the last. More will come FABRIC, a novel whose title Saramago did not want to reveal to anyone while he was writing it because, he said, if you knew it, you would know everything about him. It's hard to believe...but we'll find out soon enough.
The true story of the elephant Solomon, who in the sixteenth century walked and rode a ship from Portugal to Vienna, and the soldiers, archdukes and others who accompanied him, is perhaps Saramago's most perfect work of art, pure, true and indestructible as Mozart's aria or folk song. I wrote about him for the Guardian: "In his speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, Saramago said: 'As I could not go beyond my small piece of arable land, nor did I aspire to, I was left with only the option of digging deep, down, according to the roots. My roots, but also the roots of the world, if I am allowed such an immodest ambition.' That painstaking, patient digging is what gives a book as light and magical as this one its depth and weight. It is no ordinary fable, which the story of an elephant's journey through the follies and superstitions of sixteenth-century Europe might easily be. There is nothing more natural in her. There is no happy ending. Solomon the elephant will arrive in Vienna; and then, two years later, he will die. But its tracks will perhaps remain in the reader's mind, deep, round footprints in the dust that do not lead to the Austrian imperial castle or to any famous place, but point to a more permanent beneficent direction to follow."
Those traces are now imprinted on the electrons as well as in the dust, on the page and in the spirit; they are now in the vibrations of our computers; they are symbols on our screens, as real and intangible as light itself for all who want to see, read and follow.
(Foreword to the collected novels of José Saramago, Goodreads; Peščanik.net; translation: Slavica Miletić)
Bonus video:
